Things to do in London this weekend (30-31 May)

Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls. The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. 

London is a famously green city – nearly half of its many square miles is parks, heaths and other open space. A lot of that open space, though, consists of private squares and gardens, most of which we never get to see, never mind hang out in. London Open Gardens Weekend is here to address that, prising the keys out of the capital’s secretive gatekeepers to fling open more than a hundred secret green spaces. The event exclusively reveals some of the city’s least-seen spaces: historical, traditional, contemporary and experimental, across all four corners (and the middle bit) of London. They include formal gated garden squares, rooftop terraces with commanding views of the city skyline, community allotments and wildlife havens.

It’s always a pleasure to see folks evolve and mature. With The Golden Tooth, the duo behind puckish scenester bistro Papi have levelled up to gastro greatness. Unlike Papi, The Golden Tooth is simply a pub; the ideal blank canvas for the regal cookery and wondrous wine choices of the Papi chappies, aka chef Matthew Scott and sommelier Charlie Carr. The first menu highlight is chunky beef tartare, bound together with a creamy tonnato dressing, and topped with a gleaming egg yolk. Next comes plump mussels resting provocatively under a silky sheet of semi-sheer lardo, a stargazy pie featuring a prawn’s head poking out of the golden pastry, and a Montgomery cheddar custard tart as wobbly as the very best Basque cheesecake. This is powerful and intense food. The Golden Tooth is truly great.  

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

They grow up so fast! One of London’s best grassroots clubs, The Cause, is turning eight this summer, and to celebrate they will be going hard for a full day at the Docklands venue. First opening in Tottenham Hale in 2018, now the club – known for having some of the best house and techno programming in the city – is now firmly situated in its brilliantly DIY venue at 60 Dock Road in Silvertown. For the big day, world-class DJs like Prosumer, Sweely, Chez Damier and Planetary Assault Systems will be stepping into the booth. Pace yourself: this party, spread over eight different rooms, will go non-stop for 24 hours. 

You might have heard of the Great Exhibition, an extravaganza of world riches and inventions that drew six million visitors to Hyde Park in 1851. Prince Albert used those funds to help develop the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall. The 21st century’s answer to the Great Exhibition returns with many of London’s most esteemed museums coming together to mark the 175th anniversary of the original Great Exhibition. Exhibition Road in South Ken will be closed to cars and come alive with fun interactive experiments, mind-bending technology, music, dance, art, live science shows and parades. Highlights this year include gingerbread and sand recreations of the original crystal palace, robot football, origami spacecraft, giant roaming Indian puppets and a session baking a brownie that mirrors the surface of Mars. Plus, it’s all free to attend. 

The sign from the London Astoria, the sound monitor from the Haçienda and the hefty metal doors from The End are just some of the relics you can see at the V&A’s new display that shines a light on some of the UK’s closed-down music venues. Compiled from an open call-out, the museum has curated a free exhibition that spotlights 50 former independent venues through more than 150 objects, including photographs, band merch, clothing, flyers and posters. It also explains the issues facing grassroots nightlife while managing not to be preachy about them. After completing an interactive quiz at the end of the exhibit, you’ll be sent on your merry way to your next night out at one of five UK venues – long may they live!

Peckham Fringe returns for its fifth year with over 20 productions created by local artists and members of Peckham’s community, scheduled across five weekends in May and June. Split between Theatre Peckham and Canada, expect plenty of inventive, enthralling storytelling from the eclectic programme, with plays addressing everything from Filipino migration, radicalisation, AI therapy and protest. 

Be warned: you will almost certainly leave Power Ballad unable to get the title song and its catchy chorus out of your head. In fact, this cheerful earworm could be the movie’s most memorable element. That said, there’s always space for an easygoing comedy-drama like this one. Who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours with Paul Rudd in melting-down mode?Director John Carney, who co-wrote the script with Peter McDonald, doesn’t stray far from the modest dreams of his own global smash, the 2006 musical romance Once. But if Power Ballad is too slick to recreate that film’s organic authenticity, it does benefit from the extra polish. This is a crowd-pleasing wedding band of a movie, but a high-quality one. 

In cinemas worldwide Fri May 29.

Entertainment people Ralph are putting on four pumping summer parties between June and September. The brand’s yard will fill with music and entertainment for the occasions with 60-second portraits from cult artists, catering from the likes of Max’s Sandwich Shop and Four Legs, pizza from Homeslice, DJ sets from Alexis Hot Chip and Third Man Records, and a never-ending supply of alcoholic and soft drinks. And get this: it’s free entry, free food and free drinks the entire evening. How on earth could you say no to that? Just reserve a spot here. 

The National Portrait Gallery’s summer 2026 exhibition is turning the spotlight on one of the twentieth century’s biggest icons. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait will be a real blockbuster, exploring the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most alluring figures through works by some of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and photographers, including Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, Marlene Dumas, Milton Greene and Eve Arnold. 

Founded by local artists in 2025, Hackney Art Week is back, and this year it’s bigger than ever. Over 10 days, the extravaganza will host exhibitions, markets, workshops, performances, immersive installations, street parties and even an art treasure hunt, bringing together 60 artists and creatives at 50 venues across Dalston, Clapton, London Fields, De Beauvoir, Stoke Newington, Haggerston and Hackney Wick. Venues involved include Raleigh Chapel, Chats Palace, The Rose Lipman Building, St Augustine’s Tower, ESEACC at The Old Bath House, as well as pubs, bakeries, delis and other much-loved Hackney spots. 

‘Surreal’ is a word that, through a century of overuse, has lost most of its original meaning. Sci-fi horror Backrooms is a very accurate sense, utterly surreal. Its landscape is a vast, labyrinthine interior of harshly lit, mustard-tinted rooms and corridors, where furniture and unexpected objects meld disturbingly with the floors, walls and low ceilings. The film mirrors the way our subconscious slightly misremembers mundane architecture in dreams, with its masterful production design weaving a netherworld of soulless, sunless office spaces in which horrible things could lurk around any of its infinite blind corners. Think Stranger Things’ Upside Down by way of Severance. It’s hard not to recommend as a genuinely surreal horror experience. This is very much a journey into the heart of the uncanny valley.

In cinemas worldwide Fri May 29.

Coinciding with London Gallery Week in which more than 100 of the city’s contemporary galleries are offering free entry, Mount Street’s resident creatives are putting on a fortnight of art, publishing, fashion and food. Among the goings on, publishers Thames & Hudson will set up a pop-up bookshop with  rare and vintage editions, signed and limited runs and a lineup of talks, signings and events with authors and artists, artist Kathryn Maple will lead a public sketching workshop in Mount Street Gardens and By Walid will display a tremendous collection of homeware, sculpture and clothing made entirely from salvaged materials. 

Two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon has touched down in London to play icon of the silver screen, Judy Garland. If you’re a fan, you’ve probably seen Monsoon impersonate Garland before, but this is a different thing entirely, because End of the Rainbow is a proper two-act play (by Peter Quilter). There’s zero audience interaction, but a handful of songs breaking up what is in fact the pretty depressing story of Garland’s demise. Quilter’s play is set months before Garland’s early death in 1969 from an accidental drug overdose. Monsoon earns her stripes as Judy. Impish and sassy, but with a slow drawl, she reels off stories from her past with glee. In Jinkx Monsoon, another star rises.

Twenty-two-year-old Owen (Spike Fearn from Alien: Romulus) is a hopeless romantic who works as a sound engineer in the student union at Manchester City University. One night he meets the enigmatic Emily, dressed as a fairy, and sparks fly. But when goes to text her the next day, he’s got the wrong number. Owen then embarks on a maniacal, and often cringeworthy, quest to find his real-life manic pixie dream girl. On the way he gains the help of another Emily (The Nice Guys’ Angourie Rice), a determined psychology student writing her dissertation on romantic love. She’s looking for a case study to prove her thesis that love is an unnecessary ‘evolutionary hangover’ that can only lead to self-sabotage and madness. It’s a romcom match made in heaven, and this has all the things a good romcom should: deceit and miscommunication; a pair of plucky will-they won’t-they leads with fantastic chemistry; a grand gesture; a rousing speech; some cracking one-liners, and a great soundtrack.

Understand the history of HIV and the major global health challenge it still poses in the world today through stories of protest and care, photography, film and archival material in this new Wellcome Collection display. Across two rooms, Tenderness & Rage will explore the UK’s 1980-90s AIDS epidemic, contemporary experiences of HIV in the Global South and reveal how activist groups and volunteer-led organisations have supported and campaigned for those living with HIV. It will also spotlight the much-overlooked experience of women living with HIV in the UK and globally.

Care is acclaimed writer-director Alexander Zeldin getting back to his roots. His newest is a naturalistic yarn about an English retirement home. While contemporary stresses on the British care system are alluded to, they’re not really the point here; instead, it’s a more universal care home experience. It centres on Linda Bassett’s Joan, a grandmother who has been placed in the show’s unnamed home for what – as she sees it – is a couple of weeks to recuperate from a nasty fall. It’s an extraordinary performance from Bassett who gives an utterly unflinching performance as a kindly grandmother being slowly hollowed out over the course of the play’s nebulous time frame. It’s shamelessly emotionally manipulative in places, but it’s a world that little dramatic light gets thrown on – and with the brilliant Bassett as our proxy, it’s a powerfully unsparing guide to the end.

Peter Shaffer’s landmark 1973 play Equus has dated in some ways, but it’s still a seethingly sexual, deeply unsettling interrogation of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian that centres on Alan Strang, a young man who – as the play begins – has just brutally blinded six horses. But why? And what’s to be done? Inspired by a real life incident (that involved the blinding of 26 horses), if the author was any less earnest in the way he ploughs into Alan’s unimaginably disturbing actions and psychology, it wouldn’t work. Here, though, old-school director Lindsay Postner plays a blinder by using the Menier’s core strength of intimacy. It’s this intimacy of Posner’s production that magnifies Shaffer’s meaning. 

Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, takes on one of theatre’s great female roles in Anna Jordan’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s coruscating condemnation of the soul-destroying endlessness of warfare, directed by Globe associate artist Elle While. Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939, as fascism overtook Europe, but deliberately set it several hundred years earlier, during the Thirty Years War – intending the distance to provide a kind of allegorical universality. Jordan’s version goes further, never naming the conflict, only identifying sides by differing colours. It’s a full-blooded production that keeps a warped sense of vibrancy going until almost the end, before deftly introducing a fleeting moment of vulnerability. It feels powerfully necessary.     

Could the West End transfer of Ava Pickett’s 1536 really live up to all the hype? The answer, thankfully, is: yes, and then some. Co-produced with Margot Robbie’s production company, director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a heady, sensory experience, one that is jolted forward by faultless performances from the female leads. The 110-minute one-act run time might raise eyebrows, yet the show never loses pace, and refuses to overcook things either. 1536 is a once-in-a-blue-moon theatrical experience. I laughed. I cried. I probably could have screamed too. Pickett’s play is a tour de force, and 1536 one of those theatrical moments that stays with you for a very long time.

If you’ll always carry a torch for your teenage celeb crush, then this one’s for you. From the internet’s impact on beauty trends to all things cute and cuddly, Somerset House has a history of delving into contemporary pop cultural trends with its exhibition programming, and it continues in a similar vein with its spring 2026 exhibition. In Holy Pop! Somerset House will explore the power of fandom and the world of modern shrines. Through art, memorabilia, letters, photographs, and interactive installations, the pay what you can exhibition will uncover the rituals of idolisation, showing how fandom shapes identity, values, and community. 

The first major European exhibition of James McNeil Whistler’s work in 30 years arrives at Tate Britain in 2026. Known as a truly global artist, The Victorian oil painter re-wrote many of the rules of art, and was an early adopter of ’art for art’s sake’. The retrospective brings together the artist’s world-famous paintings such as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ (Mr Bean fans will recognise this one, IYKYK) alongside rarely, or never seen, works. It includes exquisite portraits, drawings, prints, and designs, from as early as his teens in St Petersburg to the enigmatic late self-portraits. 

Playwright David Hare collaborates again with Ralph Fiennes in this big portrait ofDame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving, two of the most important actors who ever lived, which also serves as a history of and an endearing paean to theatre. Grace Pervades is the story of their time on stage, a winking exploration of traditionalism and populism in theatre. There are clipped vowels and lavish costumes – Fiennes looks great in tights and a brocade cape – and it all looks rather lovely. It’s all good fun, a cheeky, self-referential and sometimes self-critical play. It’s an entertaining night both at the theatre and of the theatre.

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £23.60!

Save 20% on tickets, only through Time Out Offers 

This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream, Arthur Miller, is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre. New York cop Victor (Elliot Cowan) has returned with his wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), to his long-dead father’s home before it’s demolished, re-opening old wounds. A heavyweight creative team makes the weight of this past almost tangible and it’s thrilling to see talented actors really knock chunks out of each other, with the director excavating every ounce of pain from their performances. There’s some seriously meaty material here about how we take ownership of our lives when value is relative.

Artist Sian Fan’s new multidisciplinary installation at Somerset House explores how magic and mysticism manifests in our consumer-driven world. From TikTok tarot readings, to Pokémon cards, Chinese fortune knots and video game talismans, Fan’s references range from pop culture to the historical. She draws on the myths, folklore, and storytelling traditions found in contemporary gaming and popular culture, Fan highlights how spirituality persists in these ultra-modern spaces. 

Broadwick Soho arrived with serious flair in 2023 and has been serving up a hit of West End glamour, that feels both indulgent and effortlessly cool ever since. Tucked inside the hotel, Dear Jackie is its seductive Italian dining room, all Murano glow, red silk walls and plush booths that could tell a few stories. The menu leans into refined Italian comfort with superior pasta and reimagined classics, making it an ideal spot to settle in for dinner.

With this exclusive Time Out offer, you can sink into Soho’s newest slice of dolce vita decadence for less with a three courses set meun and a glass of Champagne (worth £22). The perfect pre-theatre treat or the start of a night that might run on far longer than planned.

Get 33% off with vouchers, only through Time Out Offers

A landmark exhibition exploring how Black British music has shaped culture in Britain and beyond. Items on display will include Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar, looks worn by Little Simz and newly acquired photography by Dennis Morris and Jennie Baptiste. The exhibition’s opening will also feature a sound experience by Sennheiser, and will mark the launch of a the inaugural edition of a new festival that will take place annually each spring, bringing together the East Bank’s neighbouring cultural institutions, which include the London College of Fashion, the BBC Music Studios, Sadler’s Wells East and UCL East.

Joo Young Won used to be head chef at the Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows, his new restaurant, Calong, is cosy and simple, with food made for sharing. Chef Joo was raised in South Korea, but began his cookery career in the UK, and for a long time focused on French technique. It shows. Calong sees him cooking dishes inspired by his native cuisine in a masterful light-touch fusion fashion. A warm pumpkin and crisp pear salad is delicately dressed with gochujang, cured Chalkstream trout with perfectly tart sesame and plum soy, the fried chicken is crunchy yet silky, and a BBQ onglet is sweet and tender with a bulgogi jus. It’s one of the most exciting restaurants Stoke Newington has to offer.